Most art music tends to be exclusionary, the province of elitist acts making music for tight coteries of rabid aficionados. If outsiders don't get it, so much the better. Wanna join the clan? Be prepared to pay your dues.
This is absolutely not the case with The Flaming Lips, a band that makes its own distinct brand of art music that's as inclusive as it gets. The songs — pop at their core, but dressed up in weirdness and awash in sonic filigree — resonate with a kind of joyful openness. Flaming Lips shows are celebrations of hallucinatory silliness, dance-orgy communions between band and audience that find folks donning furry animal costumes, bathed in lights and video images, surrounded by props. And then frontman/leader Wayne Coyne surfs the crowd in a big plastic bubble.
"We don't want to be this special club or anything like that," says Lips bassist/sound sculptor Michael Ivins. "I think at some point we just let go and said, 'We just like all kinds of music, and it's not us against them.' We don't have an indier-than-thou sort of attitude that some bands end up having."
The Flaming Lips have notched a total of one gold album but still retain an ongoing deal on Warner Bros. that they've enjoyed since moving from the indie imprint Reckless in 1992. Warners essentially leaves the band alone to handle all creative facets, including packaging, videos and the surround sound mixes the band is so fond of. The Lips still base out of their hometown Oklahoma City and continue to reflect the town's rigid work ethic. Coyne and company routinely comb the stage pre-show, fiddling with the details. "If you want something done the way you want it," Ivins say, "sometimes you better get in and do it yourself."
Ivins uses a juggling metaphor to describe the development of the band's three-ring-circus concerts.
"You start off with two or three oranges and then you throw another one in," he says. "You keep adding until you have 20 oranges, so throwing in one more doesn't seem like that big a deal.
"When we do shows, we're very cognizant of the idea that, not to put too fine a point on it, it's meant to be entertaining. The older [people] get, the more it takes to get them out of the house. We want to make sure it's worth their while."
The band, which formed in the mid-'80s and was grounded in noisy art-punk, started thinking spectacle from the get-go. "Even way back, we brought along cheap light shows and smoke machines and mirror balls," Ivins says. "I think it was in Florida that we managed to find these real primitive, practically homemade flashpots."
One Halloween show in Oklahoma City, Ivins remembers, "people came dressed up in rabbit suits. Everyone thought we had put them up to it, so we went ahead and took credit. That was probably the seventh or eighth orange."
As The Flaming Lips have continued to add oranges to their live presentation, they've squeezed plenty of stylistic advances into their sound. The dense, ethereal aural collages and dreamy tunes of recent albums At War With the Mystics and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots have very little in common with the visceral cacophony of the early Reckless LPs.
It's a longstanding truism that a great pop song can make just as much impact when played on a single acoustic instrument as when heard in a full production. That does not seem to be the case with the Lips. Some of their tunes are little more than nursery-rhyme sketches but get fleshed out with such invigorating sonics that the finished product can be breathtaking.
"I would generally agree with that," Ivins says. "We've gone on as long as we have because we really enjoy being in the studio and look at the studio as a whole other instrument. There have been times, though, when we thought the basic composition of the song was nice, so let's not try to ruin it by getting too clever and throwing too much stuff on it."
And The Flaming Lips don't let all that studio tracking go to waste once they get on stage. For about a decade, the group has been a trio (including drummer/composer Steve Drozd).
"Another conclusion we came to was that when you go see a band, you really want to see them play your favorite songs in an actual way that you can recognize them," Ivins posits. "When we became a three-piece in '97, we thought we'd hire a bunch of other musicians to do this and that. At that point, Steven wanted to move on from just being a drummer, so we came up with the idea of putting a lot of the tracks on tape, which gave us a way of re-creating for the stage the overdubbing experience in the studio. So you get the songs in a format that's a little rawer, but not too far off the mark from the recording."
For a while, the group performed sans drummer but these days hand the sticks to a select member of the crew.
Like most veteran bands, The Flaming Lips are well over the romance of the road. But the 90-or-so minutes on the bandstand make the grind worth it. "Sometimes Wayne'll get in just the right space in the bubble and stand up at just the right time, and it really does seem like a magical moment," Ivins says with a touch a rapture. "Somehow everything happens, the sound is just right, the audience is with us, people are singing along, and it all sort of comes together to make it seem a lot bigger than it actually is."
This article appears in Apr 11-17, 2007.