About My Lips

Regular readers know I love music, and that the Flaming Lips are my favorite band. "But how did that come about?" you ask. Well, I'm gonna tell you.

I'm a long-time subscriber to SPIN magazine, so long in fact that they actually pay me to read the thing, and every year on my birthday they throw me a giant party complete with food, beer, live music and a 12-month supply of Geritol.

I've stuck with the magazine through their new wave years, punk rock years, hip-hop years, indie rock years, the years where they wrote A LOT about AIDS, the years when they almost went out of business, the years when they've changed their look and format, desperately hoping to make it all work.

During the summer of 1988, after I'd returned from my four-month road trip from Connecticut to New Mexico and back, I read an issue of SPIN in which they mentioned a band called the Flaming Lips.

I don't recall specifics about the short article, but the writer must have mentioned psychedelia, punk rock, weirdness and possibly even Oklahoma. Something about the piece, and the band's name, struck a chord in my brain and I decided to buy one of their albums (read: cassette tapes).

In 1987, the band had released Oh My Gawd!!!...The Flaming Lips. By the time I learned about the band, I'd moved to Dover, NH, with my buddy and fellow road-tripper Pete, and his friend Joe. I went to a record store in Portsmouth and bought the tape. The band's only other album at that time was their first, Hear It Is, which I subsequently bought, along with almost everything they've produced.

Oh My Gawd!!! was unlike anything I'd ever heard, because I was never into the Beatles or '60s psychedelic rock. The only psychedelic band I liked was the Butthole Surfers. My friend Ric, who I met when we worked at Webnoize together back in the Mesozoic Era, was baffled that I wasn't a Beatles fan, but that I seemed to have pretty good taste in music. Blame it on my older brother and sister, I said.

Until I started researching and writing this post, I didn't know that the spoken-word sample that starts the first track on Oh My Gawd!!! ("Take this brother, may it serve you well.") was from the Beatles' "Revolution 9." The final track, "Love Yer Brain," ends with a looped sample of "turn off your mind, relax" from the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows." To my credit, I did recognize that sample.

The first track on Oh My Gawd!!! is "Everthing's Explodin'," which comes out roaring and never relents:

I was hooked. I remember listening to the song in my apartment, perhaps during a small party, and this girl who was dating one of the cool guys in town, a guy was in a band I liked called The Dorks, asked me, "How do you dance to this band?" She was used to slamming, I guess, and probably New Wave dancing.

I promptly demonstrated by doing some really awkward, goofy, herky-jerky moves around the living room. She was puzzled, but found it humorous.

The second song, "One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning," is far more epic. Building slowly with mellow guitars, light drumming and gently sung lyrics, the song clocks in at nine and a half minutes. This one is great with headphones. If you smoke pot, this is the time where you spark up.

The rest of the songs follow the pattern of odd samples, spoken word parts, raging psychedelia, ripsnortin' punk rock. And there are parts where the music is played backwards, yet another obvious tip of the hat to the Beatles.

Another of my favorite tracks is "Can't Stop the Spring":

As much as I loved the music, I was also into the lyrics, written and sung by Wayne Coyne, the band's co-founder and lead weirdo. On "Ode to C.C. Pt. 2," Coyne, over a simple acoustic guitar riff, sings:

This man came up to me, just the other day / asked me if I'd been born again

I told him I didn't think I had

That I had been rejected

But I think

Hell's got all the good bands, anyway

The album's closer, "Love Yer Brain," is another epic. It starts out with Wayne singing in his lovably scratchy voice over simple piano chords. About a minute and a half in, the drums kick in but the pace is still slow.

The final two and half minutes of the song are comprised of the sounds of the band smashing things and throwing things around, yelling a bit, and then the aforementioned Beatles sample comes in and things quiet down, with just a few random voices and things being slapped around.

Over the past 24 years, I've bought just about everything the band has put out. Most of it I love, especially the more hard-rockin' psychedelic punk rock from the first 10 years of their career.

There have been points in recent years where I've questioned what the Lips are doing initially, such as The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and At War with the Mystics, but for the most part I came around on those albums after several listenings.

As for the more recent Embryonic, I haven't gotten into it that much. And I didn't bother to buy the band's collaboration with Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins doing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

As for their most recent album, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, on which the band and guests including Erykah Badu, Kesha, Lightning Bolt and Prefuse 73 do both covers and originals, well I guess I should at least give it a listen.

I've seen the band live five times. The first time was in 1992 at a small club called TT the Bear's Place in Cambridge, Mass. The band filled the place with their smoke machine while they sawed away at songs from their most recent album at the time, Hit to Death In the Future Head, as well as the above-mentioned albums, and Telepathic Surgery.

I saw them a few years later at an outdoor venue in Gardner, Mass., during the day. The played on a bill with the Stone Temple Pilots (boo!) and the Butthole Surfers (yay!). Great show.

In more recent years, the Lips have toured regularly with quite a bombastic, colorful and wildly entertaining show. Here's a sample:

I've seen them do this schtick three times. And while I love it and always have a great time at these shows, I'm ready for them to move on and show me something different.

The band has sometimes confounded me (Zaireeka, which consists of four CD's designed to be played at the same time), and other times disappointed me (scattered tracks across their discography), but they've always given me hope that whatever they do will be adventurous, fun, challenging and, ultimately, uplifting.

I'm not sure what the Lips have in store for the future, but I'm sure it will make me say, "Oh my gawd!!!"