Menu
· Trevor Miller
The Flaming Lips are a band straight from the future bearing a warning; all we ever have is now.
The year is 1983. Wayne and Mark Coyne form the Flaming Lips with Michael Ivins on bass. Little did they know they’d be starting a band that would take a mind bending 40 year journey into the highest and lowest reaches of rock and roll.
The Flaming Lips early work is marked by spacey lyrics, noise and eccentric performances. A contender in the growing alternative rock scene, the band’s quirky and emotionally intelligent frontman Wayne was always seeking ways to involve the audience in their performances.
Many of those who have attended a Flaming Lips concert will attest that their shows are unlike any other; theatrical at a minimum and mind altering at the maximum. At the onset of their career, their live performances take on an almost mythological timbre. From almost burning down a venue to “Parking Lot Experiments” where attendees were given cassette tapes to play from their cars, The Flaming Lips were pioneers of the neo-psychadelic renaissance.
Their breakthrough single off the 1993 album “Transmissions From The Satellite Heart” was “She Don’t Use Jelly,” a silly and surreal tune about a woman eating toast with vaseline instead of jelly (listen to it right now if you haven’t already). The song reached #55 on the Billboard 100 and catapulted the bands opportunities to tour and gain exposure on the national spotlight.
From an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman and a reference in Beavis and Butt-head, The Flaming Lips deal with pop culture was sealed. The band would go on to produce two legendary records while signed with Warner Brothers, The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (which went on to win a Grammy Award). Longtime collaborator and producer David Fridman would later produce notable psych-rock masterpieces like Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker and MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular.
The Flaming Lips impression on the world of neo-psycadelia is unavoidable.
Like many bands, The Flaming Lips faced mainstays of rock and roll dysfunction. From multi-instrumentalist and core band member Steven Drozd’s struggle with heroin addiction (inspiration of The Spiderbite Song) to legal challenges over the band’s name, The Flaming Lips were not immune to various tragedies.
Moreover, not every record produced from The Flaming Lips would go on to be a commercial hit. “Hit to Death in the Future Head” was a veritable flop due to sample clearance issues and low sales. Their experimental record “Zaireeka” was too ahead of its time with a multi-CD release requiring multiple record players, rendering it unplayable by most of the listening public.
In lieu of these challenges, The Flaming Lips never quit and never stopped pushing their creative boundaries.
There is so much more to The Flaming Lips than this blog can possibly contain (their catalogue spans 36 major releases). We insist that you give them a dedicated listen and see the magic that they’ve delivered to audiences around the globe for 40 years.
Irreplaceable and inimitable, The Flaming Lips will continue to invent until they’ve invented all they can.