Flaming Lips

As a young man, as one of his first girlfriends would recall, Wayne Coyne looked like a cross between Leif Garrett and Peter Frampton. He was, in short, what you'd call a good-looking guy. But Wayne was also someone with a big personality, always ready with a quick answer, and he had a real passion for drawing, painting, and above all music. He would never truly abandon the first two, but it was music that would give him a future. When he managed to put a band together, after learning to play guitar through sheer stubborn dedication and after coming to terms with solitude ("the most boring thing of all," he liked to say), it wasn't hard for him to find a venue in Oklahoma City willing to let him perform. So the first thing he did was draw up some outlandish flyers to advertise the event, relying on characters clearly inspired by those created by Robert Crumb, announcing that in a few days' time, in that February of 1983, the "boldest band in Oklahoma" would make its debut - that's exactly what he'd written, without a hint of hesitation, specifying that the whole thing would be "totally free."

Now, at the start of the 1980s, Oklahoma City, half an hour's drive from Norman, the town where Wayne and his family had moved after leaving their native Pittsburgh, was certainly not the best place to make rock music. Plenty of bands there had no ambition beyond playing country and blues-rock covers, while others leaned towards rockabilly, usually performed at the Bowery, the coolest venue in town. Sure, there was no shortage of new wave and hardcore fans, some of whom had even decided to try their hand at it themselves, but overall, it has to be said, that place was hardly New York or Los Angeles. And besides, Wayne wasn't one to confine himself to a single scene - he loved both hardcore and classic rock, without denying himself a deep taste for psychedelia, not just that of his beloved Pink Floyd, but even its most extreme and adventurous strains. In short, that cross between Leif Garrett and Peter Frampton "wanted to experiment," because in his world there were no fences between genres: "To me, it's all music. I don't care where it comes from." Which, in the end, was exactly what he had in mind when he thought about the true "spirit of punk," while thinking about psychedelia came naturally to him as a way of engaging with the freedom to focus first and foremost on sound, rather than on the instruments used to produce it: "It's the freedom of 'we don't care, we're just here to make sounds. We don't care if that comes from drums, computers, animals, or whatever.'"

So he left behind his first band, made up of guys only interested in playing the usual classic-rock covers, and started hanging around with bassist Michael Lee Ivins, someone who already had a fairly eventful life behind him, having gone to Vietnam with his family right when, as he liked to point out, "the shit was about to hit the fan."

Rounding out the first Flaming Lips line-up (the name Wayne chose for his band, perhaps because he had some unidentified porn film in mind, or an obscure drug reference, or maybe because he'd once dreamed of the Virgin Mary kissing him in the back seat of a car...) were Wayne's brother Mark on vocals and Dave Kostka on drums, and it was with this line-up that they made their live debut. Except one night Kostka refused to play a gig at a drag venue, so he was replaced by Richard English, who at the time had started delving deep into Beatles and Who productions - something that suited Wayne just fine, especially since he'd taken the Who as his model, so he felt like a new Pete Townshend and figured his brother Mark could hold his own as Roger Daltrey. English, meanwhile, had no trouble picturing himself as Keith Moon, having drawn on the great, unforgettable English drummer to shape his own agile, frantic style.

Having recorded a first, self-titled Ep in 1984, marked by a garage-psychedelic sound still haunted by the ghosts of post-punk, the band played out more and more often, turning their shows into full-blown sensory assaults, dominated by a fog and bubble machine, strobe lights, and a few mirror-inlaid spheres (handled by Ivins, via a device he'd rigged up next to his amp). That tension between being, essentially, well-behaved small-town kids - even rather awkward ones - and the desire to make a public spectacle of themselves, trying to leave an indelible mark not only through their music, was sparked by the example of an obscure art-punk trio from the same Oklahoma City, who had decided to call themselves The Hostages: "Anyone who suddenly found themselves listening to them and watching them would have thought they were fucking crazy. But we knew them. And even though their music and their live show were insane, as people they were very normal and kind. So we figured we too could make weird records and put on weird shows, despite being totally normal dorks."

Despite having managed to fulfil one of his dreams, namely recording and releasing his band's music, Wayne never stopped listening to everything that came his way, driven by curiosity to find out whether there was anything out there that went beyond the usual routine. One day, he tuned into the music show that journalism student David Fallis hosted on the University of Oklahoma's radio station, and he saw the light: "I hadn't listened to that show for a couple of weeks, and right then Fallis was playing a different kind of American underground music, not the usual skinhead rock and white-power stuff he used to play. Anyway, I found myself hearing Redd Kross, R.E.M., Black Flag, Meat Puppets, Butthole Surfers, and I thought: 'Wow, this stuff is amazing!' It was melodic, intense without being one-dimensional, and some of those bands sounded truly great. Then I heard a track by Hüsker Dü, who up until then I'd always written off as 'just another hardcore band,' and it turned out they'd recently done a cover of 'Eight Miles High' by the Byrds, and fuck!, it was this fierce, burning religious spasm, all melody and energy, and it was so out of control that the music ended up overwhelming even the people playing it. It shook me, it transported me, so I thought: 'Finally, punk rockers are dropping acid!'" Which wasn't far off from what Cris Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets was saying around the same time - that punk rock, albeit on a smaller scale, had more than a little in common with the hippie movement.

After that eye-opening experience, the Flaming Lips began to sharpen their sound, releasing a first Lp, "Hear It Is" (1986), in which garage-rock, psychedelia, and traces of pop and new wave came together into a striking sonic tapestry, followed by a second, "Oh My Gawd!!!...The Flaming Lips" (1987), even more effective in forcing their garage-rock to reckon with psychedelia - especially the Pink Floyd/Syd Barrett strain - and marked by an unabashedly citational streak. Even better, though, was the following "Telepathic Surgery," the album with which the Flaming Lips would ideally close out their first, wildest and most freak-out phase.

It really does seem like the Flaming Lips are something you could build your life around

(Wayne Coyne, 1988)

Having received from Restless, the Californian label with whom they'd made their debut and which had backed them up to that point, a bigger advance than usual (ten thousand dollars, practically double what they'd gotten for "Hear It Is"), Wayne and Michael (who, in the meantime, kept experimenting with sleep deprivation, trying to reach states of hallucination not induced by drugs) tried to think bigger, envisioning the new record as a work built around a roughly thirty-minute noise-psychedelic collage that would take up an entire side of the new album. In the end, though, things didn't go that way, and "Telepathic Surgery" came out as a simple LP of a scant thirty-nine minutes of music, which rose to nearly sixty-five on the CD version, where, luckily, alongside the addition of "Fryin' Up", the twenty-three minutes of "Hell's Angel's Cracker Factory" also appeared, a direct offshoot of that noise-psychedelic collage.

Obviously, the version we're interested in dissecting here is the latter, because it's on this version that the Flaming Lips reached the peak of their rock postmodernism, using citation itself as fuel for their creativity. On this point, to borrow what Art Black wrote in the magazine Away From The Pulsebeat, the "original sources" that Wayne and co. drink from "are comparable to aspirin and acid", in the sense that they have a fluidifying, hallucinatory effect on their inventio.

Compared to its predecessors, "Telepathic Surgery" is grittier and noisier, reflecting the influence of two pivotal bands from the US alternative scene of the Eighties: "I think we were definitely influenced by Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth and other noise bands. We were looking for the limits of our own musicality. At the same time, though, we thought: 'Well, we can be noisy too!'". Even though, on the whole, the Flaming Lips remained more fascinated, musically speaking, by the New York band, at some point they found they had more in common with Butthole Surfers. "In 1986 we played a show with them, and we were struck both by their freakiness and by that attitude of leaving nothing untried, and it was intense, scary and just plain wonderful", Wayne recalls. But there was more to it: "The Butthole guys were people we could identify with, whereas we couldn't, say, identify with Thurston Moore. Sonic Youth were good people, but there was a typically New York artsy air about them, and we were just a bunch of hillbillies. When we hung out with the Surfers, we were brothers, and they became for us the living embodiment of the principle that 'being in a band is what you do, because it's what you are'".

The writing and recording of "Telepathic Surgery" coincided with a less-than-peaceful period for Wayne, who also had to put up with criticism from his then-girlfriend and band manager Michele Vlasimsky, who accused him of making the new material far too cerebral. Either way, out of Dallas's Goodnite Audio studios came a work destined to remain a landmark in the history of the band and of neo-psychedelia.

"Telepathic Surgery" hit record store shelves on January 3, 1989, wrapped in a cover featuring a photo, shot with a fish-eye lens, of Michael bare-chested with one hand resting on a barbed-wire fence, while with the other he holds a hubcap in front of his face. In the background, a power-line pylon looms over a field stretching as far as the eye can see.

As for the rest, Wayne recalls with some annoyance: "I sent Restless my own idea for the cover art, but we wanted someone else to handle the lettering for us: I'd only sketched, in all of ten minutes, what I sent them, but they sent it back saying they'd already done it. It was a total disaster, but by that point we couldn't change it anymore". The leader of the "Flaming Lips" did, however, get his way on the choice of the back-cover photo: an eyeball about to be dropped down a sink drain. Wayne loved eyeballs: he'd wanted one on the back cover of "Hear It Is" too, while he'd placed a couple in the eye sockets of the skulls that loom on the cover of "Oh My Gawd!!!...".

"The phrase 'telepathic surgery' refers to something you can't see, hear or touch, but that gets into your head until it starts bothering you

(Wayne Coyne)

Two hits of the drumstick on the snare's rim and the riff that kicks off "Drug Machine In Heaven" summons the Flaming Lips together around a Stooges-style take on early Pink Floyd. The track's intensity (which some also trace back to the earliest Sonic Youth) is sharpened by Richard English's powerful, acrobatic drumming (he turns in a truly exceptional performance throughout the record), while in the lyrics Wayne seems to be alluding to a particularly intense love affair ("Every time we fly together/ Our airplane explodes in the sky/ We're working in an explosives factory/ Because we don't care if we die") and, at the same time, calls for the coming of a "20th century Jesus", one who "makes us rich", because, well, even if the Earth is hell, he — Wayne, that is — has no interest in changing, since hell itself is exactly what he likes ("I don't want to be no one else/ I like it here, 'cause I like hell").

Shortly after the release of "Telepathic Surgery", Sub Pop asked the Flaming Lips if they could use "Drug Machine In Heaven" for their monthly Singles Club selection. The band agreed and re-recorded the track under the title "Drug Machine", this time offering up a grunge version, as if it were being played by the Nirvana of "Bleach". On the 7" released by the Seattle label, the track comes paired with two covers: "Strychnine" by the Sonics and "What's So Funny (About Peace, Love And Understanding)" by Brinsley Schwarz, the latter based on the version Elvis Costello cut in 1978.

The Barrett-esque progressions of "Astronomy Domine" pair up with an insistent bass pulse to hurl "Right Now" into a scorching dissertation on a psychedelic trip with existentialist overtones ("We think we know exactly who we are/ But sometimes I think we've gone too far"; "My life and my hours lie on the floor"). The guitar tremolo that fills the track's first two or three seconds, acting as a micro-intro, is clearly another tribute to the great English guitarist, the "piper at the gates of dawn": "Growing up in the Seventies, Pink Floyd were everywhere. My brothers, my older sister and all their friends constantly played their records while smoking weed in their rooms. Especially 'The Dark Side Of The Moon'. I listened to that record every day for at least three or four years". Still, "it was Barrett I felt closest to, because he was so messed up and introverted".

Either way, on "Right Now" Wayne's acrobatic, powerful guitar bursts generate such a dazzling electric jubilation that they immediately conjure the imperious windmilling of Pete Townshend's right arm, as he loved to strike his guitar strings with wild pick slashes. After all, the Who had been a genuine revelation for him: "When I saw them live in 1977, it really was a moment that changed my perception; it wasn't music anymore, it was like some deeply religious power. At the time they were still playing songs from 'Tommy', but played, in a way, the way they sound on 'Live At Leeds', where there was just chaos and total liberation. And even though people said that, when I saw them, they weren't at their peak power, that night they were plenty powerful. Those were a couple of hours of music that changed my life. They were fucking devastating. I walked out like I'd had my head rearranged".

The daylight rips at my naked thoughts

A hundred miles an hour

But I'm still lost right now

We think we know just who we are

But sometimes I think we’ve gone too far

Right now… right now

During the recording of the album, it could happen that someone would settle down to rest wherever they could. Michael, for instance, was one of those who loved sleeping next to the guitar amplifier. One day, Wayne decided to give him a wake-up call: he grabbed the guitar and unleashed a violent freakout, quite similar to those of Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers. That's how "Michael, Time To Wake Up" was born. As sound engineer Ruben Ayala would recall: "Wayne was going crazy, and I swear to God, even though the sound was that loud, Michael didn't even move. All he did was roll over onto his other side to keep sleeping."

The band's love of quoting reaches one of its peaks in the melancholic power ballad "Chrome Plated Suicide", which draws inspiration from "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N' Roses ("I think someone showed me the chords to that song back then", Wayne would later say) and from "Blowin' In The Wind" by Bob Dylan, to sing of love as a "telepathic surgery" (hence the album's title!), because it "does things you can't see" and "cuts and scratches just like Iggy Pop thrown down a hole". A love that, as the chorus goes, "would be the best thing in the world" if only you could do without the "nerves" and keep only the "words".

"Hari-Krishna Stomp Wagon (Fuck Led Zeppelin)" looks to the macho epic of Page & Plant's band (the riff sounds like a sped-up version of the one from "Misty Mountain Hop"), bending it into a context where garage and post-punk compete to see who can puff up their tail feathers more. In the background, further traces of pint-sized existentialism: "Refusing existence, everything seems to burn on its own".

As for "Miracle On 42nd Street", it's a sweet interlude for bass, touches of piano and voice, all introduced by a radio dial jumping from one station to another. In the lyrics, a mysterious story unfolds:

I was walking down the street the other day

There was a car that was burning, but the radio was still on

So I ran down the block to the phone

And ended up taking care of this blind guy

So he could come down and watch the fire

The pounding "Fryin' Up" repeatedly regurgitates the immortal riff of "Born To Be Wild" by Steppenwolf, stumbling over orchestral sweeps and recalling the days Coyne spent working as a fry cook at the Long John Silver's in Oklahoma City, a job that hadn't let him put much money aside, but that had given him, as he liked to remember, "the freedom to dream", which is true, just as it's also true that he still managed to scrape together a bit more cash by dealing marijuana, and that mattered a lot, since "you had to work to make money", because only that way could you then go and play your own music, with which Wayne still couldn't make any money. However, it was precisely while he was an employee at Long John Silver's that Wayne looked death in the face, and that's how he took hold of his own life once and for all. It all happened when two guys walked into the restaurant with guns drawn, ready to make off with the day's takings: "Up until that moment, I had never really realized I was alive. Afterwards, for about six months, I walked around without those stupid petty hang-ups you have as a teenager. It was wonderful. I think that near-death experience sort of elevated me a bit, and also made me understand that I really wanted to play the music I had in my head. It wasn't just about being a rockstar anymore".

The masterpiece of the album, and perhaps of the entire Flaming Lips songbook, is contained within the twenty-three minutes of "Hell's Angel's Cracker Factory", which proceeds in a very free form along two parallel tracks. The first features essentially guitar and drums, weaving an exciting jam on the border between space-rock, lysergic hard-rock and noise, in which traces of Hawkwind emerge (a track like "Brainstorm" might be a good clue for reading its influence between the lines), visions of Hendrix flying towards "Third Stone From The Sun" and of Helios Creed somewhere between "Alien Soundtracks" and "Half Machine Lip Moves", as well as dreamlike fragments of "Albatross" by Fleetwood Mac. The whole thing is introduced by a shadowy drone and the roar of a motorcycle, as is only fitting, since Wayne owned one he was very attached to, and so it seemed natural to him to also play, in the title, on that reference to the Hells Angels, the biker gang that had several ties to the psychedelic counterculture of the Sixties and that was responsible, among other things, for the riots and the death of a spectator during the infamous Altamont Free Concert in December 1969, an event that ideally marked the end of the great utopia of peace & love carried by the hippie community. For Wayne, however, the reference to the Hells Angels was also a way of keeping alive the memories of his youth, when he and his friends played football flat out, calling themselves "fearless freaks": "It was kind of like being in the Hells Angels or something. Being surrounded by all these people who desperately crave a bit of intensity in life… And I think listening to music, taking drugs, riding motorcycles, playing football, etc., in the end just means wanting more life…". A desire that can be clearly felt in the guitar workouts of this first track running through "Hell's Angel's Cracker Factory".

In the second, meanwhile, the band puts together a kaleidoscopic collage in perfect psychedelic style, drawing on, among other things, operatic voices, radio recordings, reversed tapes, flashes of musique concrète, deranged manipulations, wheezing harmonicas, small piano figures and, to close things off, a sample taken from "Get Up (I Feel like Being A) Sex Machine" by James Brown.

“With ‘Hell’s Angel’s Cracker Factory’, we wanted to record our own version of ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’,” said Wayne. In other words, the three-part suite that closed “Atom Heart Mother” by Pink Floyd. However, the real touchstone pinkfloydiano track seems to be one of the great masterpieces of the English band's barrettiana era, namely “Interstellar Overdrive”, which the Oklahoma City “fearless freaks” naturally conjure with the swagger of punk rockers who've finally decided to drop acid.

What pushed the Flaming Lips toward the experimental direction of “Hell’s Angel’s Cracker Factory” wasn't just their love of the eccentric, but also the praise they received, after their first two records, from some of their peers. This is how Wayne remembers that period: “After ‘Hear It Is’ and ‘Oh My Gawd!!!...’, various bands kept coming to us asking how we'd achieved those results, and that ended up encouraging us to keep pushing our sonic exploration. That's why, in the end, most of our energy went into making ‘Hell’s Angel’s Cracker Factory’.”

Also crucial to the making of this masterpiece was the lesson taught by one of the bands that had most captured young Wayne's imagination: the Beatles. Above all the Beatles of the “White Album”, and one song in particular, a vocal fragment of which (“Take this, brother, may it serve you well”) had been placed at the start of “Everything's Explodin'”, the opening track of “Oh My Gawd!!!...”: “The ‘White Album’ is one of those records that's a bit sloppy, recorded in strange rooms. It has this unusual atmosphere, damaged by drugs. As far as I'm concerned, the Beatles wouldn't be who they are without ‘Revolution 9’. Without that track, I wouldn't have loved them as much. Even though I was very young, I always thought ‘Revolution 9’ was just as valid, just as listenable, just as perfect as ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ — something with a lot of structure, melody, lyrics. Only years later did I realize just how unsettling that collage really was.”

Often underrated by fans of the second phase of the Flaming Lips (who, to be fair, frequently write off the entire “Telepathic Surgery” as a transitional record and leave it at that), and even before its release by Vlasimsky herself (who ended up pushing Wayne to cut some of the more extreme passages during mixing), “Hell’s Angel’s Cracker Factory” is actually a pivotal moment in the history and evolution of the American band (“a necessary learning experience for the band's progress,” in Wayne's words). Critic Mark Richardson, for one, noticed as much, arguing that the roots of the singular experiment that was “Zaireeka” (1997) lie precisely in this sprawling gem, which gave the three Okies the chance to “dive headlong into abstraction.”

“U.F.O. Story” is a three-part suite: in the first part, Wayne tells his bandmates about talking to his friend Michael Stipe of R.E.M., spooking him with the memory of a couple of sightings in which he and his younger brother Mark watched no fewer than six UFOs line up above their heads! (“This story,” Wayne will say, “was supposed to be very spontaneous, but we rehearsed it quite a lot”); in the second part, the guitar grinds out an obsessive riff that builds to a noise-rock catastrophe; and in the third part, finally, a piano melody (written by Richard) adds a touch of melancholy to the whole thing.

Embellished by a harmonica solo (played by guest Craig “Niteman” Taylor of Killbilly), “Redneck School Of Technology” (for which a video was also made) returns to the driving frenzy of garage rock, this time bending it into a vehicle for Southern rock mirages (it's no coincidence that Ronnie Van Zant, singer of Lynyrd Skynyrd, is explicitly namechecked in the lyrics, where Wayne, eager to “reconsider things,” claims he wants to “live every day like a trucker without his stimulants,” admitting that if his school “had burned down,” he'd surely have “gotten smarter sooner”).

Opened by a sample taken from the fifth movement (“Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks”) of Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition” (1886), “Shaved Gorilla” instead delivers a bittersweet ballad whose lyrics are without doubt the most surreal on the record: “We took a gorilla and shaved him/ And I bought him a motorcycle/ I swear if God would only let us, we'd trade it in/ We don't much care anymore, now.”

As for “The Spontaneous Combustion Of John”, it's the shortest track on the record (just fifty-three seconds long) and offers up a lo-fi dark-folk vignette: “It's a real shame, Johnny smokes/ And his eyes are full of fire/ Like the first time Captain Marvel zapped him/ Right between the eyes.” The song was credited to Richard English, who was trying his hand at writing some of his first songs around that time. “I don't think that was really what I wanted to do,” he'll say. “Part of me was competing with Wayne, because I wanted to find out if I was actually capable of writing them.”

Steeped in a sweetly nostalgic atmosphere, “Last Drop Of Morning Dew”, besides sounding like a faster version of “Shaved Gorilla” (almost as if the Flaming Lips were playing at self-quotation here!), could be either the best Replacements song Paul Westerberg never wrote, or a tribute to the Jesus and Mary Chain, another band Wayne loved dearly. The lyrics dwell on man's unease, his precariousness, and the guilt of God:

And all those plans I made

By the end of the day they've all changed

Because God screwed up when he made us

Because he made us so we could hate each other

And the world could end in an instant

In closing the circle, “Begs And Achin'” swings back toward Led Zeppelin territory and a certain strain of Southern rock, complete with a cocky Wayne guitar solo. And the UFOs return too: “I see ya flying in your ufo all the time/ Crash and burning in my back yard/ It’s begs and aching all the time”. That's for the first minute and twenty seconds or so. Then it winds down. And in your ears it's as if every moment of the album parades past, one folded into the next. Like a “telepathic surgery”. Or an undertow of all our possible memories.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

22/12/2024