Take Me to Your Leader

Waging War Internally,
The Flaming Lips Provide More Questions Than Answers

By Maurice Spencer Teilmann
Photo by J. Michelle Martin-Coyne

History has proven that, by the sheer constancy of their repetition, there are only a few stories truly worth retelling. Found in religious texts, history books and works of fiction, these tales form the cornerstones of nearly every civilization. In recent times, however, one particular archetype has reoccurred with alarming frequency: it’s the one where an enlightened individual attempts to teach the world to love, and is promptly destroyed for it. The last 100 years alone have claimed Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy with the blast of an assassin’s bullet. Hell, even Lennon was murdered. The job of modern-day spiritual leader has an unenviable turnover rate. In the vacuum of moral guidance we look to anyone standing above the crowd for the answers—to our nouveaux royalty, our entertainers, the enigmatic captors of our imaginations. Yet musicians and poets exist not to provide the answers—nor are they supposed to. Their higher purpose is to find the words to voice our questions. Sometimes, occasionally, we even listen; and when we do, their words provide us comfort. Last October, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne told the roughly 2,000 spectators onboard the Xingolati Groove Cruise that he didn’t have any answers; he was as confused and scared as the rest of us. Still, by getting together and talking about it, maybe that could bring us a little bit closer to some sort of resolution, or at least make us feel less freaked out about the evils of the world. And you know what? He was right.

At War With the Mystics breaks new ground for the perpetually groundbreaking Flaming Lips. Again, we find bassist Michael Ivins engineering the recording sessions alongside producer David Fridmann, Steven Drozd providing the lion’s share of the musical arrangements and performances and Wayne Coyne giving voice to the vagaries. But for once, their flare for experimentation doesn’t happen in terms of avant-garde musical composition as much as it does in an overarching conceptual theme. In a series of two interviews—first onboard Xingolati in October 2005 before the completion of the album, and the second in January 2006—Synthesis spoke with The Flaming Lips to discuss their new album, the existential influences of their music and artwork, those celebratory social experiments known as rock concerts, and why rock stars are a poor choice for leaders.

What can you tell us about the new album—is there a central theme to it?
Wayne Coyne: There are so many of the themes of all music, it’s virtually the same every time: it’s all about death and love and some internal struggle, existential despair—you know, all the good themes. I feel like something in us changed when we started playing Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” I felt like somewhere along the way, we got more jazzed up or more inquisitive about playing some sort of precise, simple, evil, but almost understated sort of rock guitar stuff. I think some of it, there’s a slight radicalism bent that feels kind of like we’re talking about hating George Bush and changing society and tearing all this bullshit down, but I don’t think we’re really talking about anything other than what’s inside ourselves. I think that’s kind of our way of rationalizing it or something because it does seem silly for a bunch of old guys to be singing about [raises his voice] The Man! Fuck the Man!
Steven Drozd: Hey, our tax bracket sucks man, we gotta change that shit. Stuff to sing about there, pal! [laughs]
WC: I don’t know if we know yet. I think that the title, At War With the Mystics, has kind of given us a “wizard meets the evils of the world, wars and warlords”… I don’t know. All music relies on the audience to kind of give it the other, “what does it all mean?” I don’t think a band or any other artist can ever know what their work really means until the audience hears it and says, “oh, it’s this or that.”
SD: Well, you’ve done some artwork, you’ve done some paintings and stuff…color schemes, it’s taking shape.
WC: There is some confrontation with a big, globular, unknown substance that seems to be the theme of the record, yeah.
Michael Ivins: [laughing] …“some globular unknown substance”…
SD: The Man?
WC: The evil dark, maybe inside all of human nature or just…
SD: The Man?
WC: Or just, yeah, your own insanity. Or The Man.
SD: That could be your own insanity, The Man. Any struggle you have, that’s The Man.
WC: Oh, I gotcha, I gotcha. I like that.

One thing I love about your concerts is that everyone seems to be along for the ride. What is it about your music that causes people give into that and be part of the experiment?
MI: After a while you can’t just sit there like this [with your arms crossed]. We’ve played plenty of shows where people will do that, and they just get so disgusted by the level of happiness and hokum that they just leave. But you can’t stand there and not get caught up in it, so either they leave or they stay and they love it [laughs]. That’s my theory. But you never see someone sitting there just bummed out.

When you look out into the audience, is it still surprising that people have this much of an emotional response to what you guys do?
WC: Music is like that, music bonds people. If you like the same music as someone, you’re gonna feel like you’re already friends. You get enough of those people in the same room all saying, “we like the same thing!” and we sing those songs and they respond. It happens at some concerts that we would think are horrible. I mean, it happens at Bon Jovi concerts, too. It’s not the quality of the music, it’s the quality of how much the song touched their lives. Sometimes the worst song in the world is attached to some element of your life. I think with The Flaming Lips, though, people feel good that they like us and that they won’t read in some magazine that their favorite band in the world are a bunch of sellouts or poseurs with sad haircuts.
SD: [laughing] …“sad haircuts”…
WC: But no, it’s wonderful to look out there and be on the receiving end of that kind of applause. I think we forget ‘cause we get to do it a lot. These people who are in the animal costumes up there with us, just by virtue of being on the receiving end of all that love, it’s a powerful moment. So they walk away [saying], “it’s the greatest moment I ever had!” And we think, “ah, you got to stand up there for an hour and a half in a smelly animal costume, how good could that be?” But I can understand, it’s because they’re receiving and sensing that love. Probably as good as it gets, really, to get paid to do this. MI: Who could ask for anything more?

[Three months later, Wayne is sitting next to producer Dave Fridmann, finishing up the 5.1 DVD audio version of the album. It’s early in the morning. There is snow on the ground. We are all drinking coffee.]

Onboard Xingolati, you had mentioned at one point that you wanted a new sound and didn’t want to repeat too much of the old stuff. Now that you’re finished with the album, what is that new sound, what did you do differently for this album?
WC: I always try and remind people it’s not that we sit here and think of new ideas; I think it’s always just fumbling around in the dark until you find something. We have some very strange kind of prog-rock guitar riffs with very funky, minimalist kind of drums, which is not necessarily different from the rest of the world.
If The Flaming Lips are known for anything, it’s not for holding back, you know? I don’t think we purposefully held back even on this, I just think we found some things that were very simple, that were pleasing. So I think there is some sort of radically minimal but strange existential protest rock. How about that?

I feel that.
WC: As I get older, I do want to convey some sense of this internalizing that happens as people mature, but they are still curious about the world. I think there’s an element of existential acceptance that happens. If The Flaming Lips stand for anything, it’s that we’ve always been the cheerleaders, the parade leaders of optimism and believing in the possibilities. And I don’t want for people to think that’s diminished, but there’s also an element of acceptance that there are some things in the world that we can’t change. We have to live with them, we have to live with the ideas of failure and death and still find a way to be satisfied and a way to be happy even though there’s nothing you can do about these horrible things. You live with that. That’s acceptable.

Most of my friends attend rock concerts more religiously than they do church. People are looking for a leader, and there’s some tendency to think of people like The Flaming Lips as the shaman-priests of our generation.
WC: I don’t think anybody should look to guys in rock bands for the answers. You want entertainment that is relevant to what’s going on in your life. I think there’s always going to be some element of the guys on stage screaming about what an idiot George Bush is, but certainly I haven’t said anything that people don’t know already. I think that sometimes when I say it, the reason it works so well is because we’re all thinking it already. We’re all sort of paralyzed together, we don’t know what to do, but sometimes getting together and speaking about it, talking about it relieves some anxiety about it.

Finally, you’ve painted a lot of the album covers for the Lips. At what point, what influences what? As a painter, does that help you narrow down and focus on what the album is about, or is it the other way around; you listen to the music and get a visual idea from that and represent it with the painting? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
WC: Damn! I don’t know if there truly is an answer. I would think that it’s all of the same ilk, but I don’t know. I guess it’s probably the latter. The music gets created, then I have an idea of how the visuals will shape the meaning of this music. Music, what’s great about it is it’s so subjective, yet it’s so abstract. It really has no shape to it at all.
Honestly, some of these paintings, they’ll take me 10 minutes to do. I mean you can sort of see sometimes they’re just a bunch of scratchy junk that’s kind of being painted almost like a hallucination right in front of you. And I know my artwork, there’s not too much detail; it sort of collapses if it becomes too clear. I want it to always seem like you can never tell exactly what’s going on. Not abstract expressionism, but there’s an expressionism part of it that you add to it and I want that to be part of the painting, where you see something in there the next person may not see it. But yeah, I don’t know, that’s a good question. I think about that myself.
Luckily, the process of just how you get to do it, sometimes you’re just running so fast you say, “oh that’s done, now let’s do this.” You’re sort of tossing these things behind you as you go. Certainly when it works, I’m like, “Fuck, that’s cool.” How do we do it? I don’t know.

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Record Label Warner Bros Released April 2006

Tracks The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song... (With All Your Power) Free Radicals (A Hallucination of the Christmas Skeleton Pleading with a Suicide Bomber) The Sound of Failure/It's Dark... Is it Always This Dark?? My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion (The Inner Life as Blazing Shield of Defiance and Optimism as Celestial Spear of Action) Vein of Stars The Wizard Turns On... The Giant Silver Flashlight and Puts on His Werewolf Moccasins It Overtakes Me/The Stars Are So Big... I Am So Small... Do I Stand a Chance? Mr. Ambulance Driver Haven't Got a Clue The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat) Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung Goin' On