The Flaming Lips: Wayne Coyne

Well, the friend who’s helping me do it wanted to open a gallery, so a lot of it is based on his interests. He had a gallery five or six years ago, and he had some dilemmas with the building and finances and stuff. When this came around, he had talked to me in the beginning of January. He said, “You know, I’d like to open another gallery.” I was interested in it because he’s interested in it. That would be number one.

I think, beyond that, we just thought it could be very cool, you know. We wanted to bring in artists that we knew from all over the world -- to bring stuff here [to Oklahoma City] so it could be part of our world. I travel all the time, but not everybody here does. So we thought we would do that and it would be interesting to meet these people and be around them.

Plus, we just wanted a space where we could have freaky events: concerts, you know, experimental art, experimental performances, parties where people do drugs and hangout; a place where we could be at 4 o’clock in the morning that isn’t one of our houses. So we thought, “Why not make this place?” If we’re lucky it’ll attract artists and weirdos, people who are already our friends, and be a way we can make new friends. There’s a lot of things about it.

Yeah, I agree! Once you start in that mode it does kind of remind you that anything is possible -- if you’re lucky enough to have money and energy at the same time. It would be difficult for someone a lot younger than me, who doesn’t have as many connections as me, as much money and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, I agree. I think it’s a great, explosive, freaky time for the Flaming Lips, like, “Fuck! Let’s do this stuff, you know?” Again, I’m lucky; I’m around a lot of people who are energetic. They feed off my energy and I feed off of theirs. That makes all the difference.

Yeah! I think understanding this big range of our experience of what life is makes the other [aspects] deeper. It’s a dumb analogy, but it’s the idea that you really don’t want to just sit there and eat candy all day. Or potato chips. But if you have the right combination you can almost do it endlessly, because one is giving you a different sensation than the other.

When we talk about believing the idea that we can create our own happiness, and that happiness means something to us, we don’t want it to be empty. It’s only because of our experiences -- that we know how horrible the world can be, how boring the world can be, how full of pain the world can be -- that we want to believe that happiness and pleasure can be just as potent. But we can’t know how potent either of them are if we don’t really know them.

When we’re doing songs we’re singing about whatever it is that’s fucking with us. You never sing about the whole scope of what your life is. You’re really singing about a very specific moment. Sometimes it’s about questioning, “What am I about?” Other times it’s, “Why do we have to die?” Other times it’s like, “Man it’s great to feel good and have good times.” A lot of it is based on these little experiences. But I think music can expand anything a thousand times over because it makes your mind kind of involuntarily swim around. That’s one of the mysteries of music: how it engages all the different parts of our mind at the same time.

So even though I might be singing something that sounds simple, like, “Everyone you know someday will die,” with music and with the inertia of where that’s going to take you it can be a big, epic statement. That’s why we love music so much, because it makes everything -- if it want to be -- bigger and better.



That’s why we want it on all the time. If you’re driving to the grocery store in your car, you want to be taken, yeah.

It’s probably connected to everybody’s childhood in some way, but it’s very connected to mine. I was born in 1961, long before there was even video tape. The only time you could see a movie, if you didn’t see it in the movie theater, was when it played on television. When I was young The Wizard of Oz played on television, I think, around Easter every year. So every year for the first, probably, ten years of my life I’d see this movie. That would be one of the only movies that you would have seen multiple times. Nowadays you can watch a movie a hundred times and it doesn’t even matter because every movie ever is available to you, all the time.

So it became that you got to know the music, and know these characters. I think, as I started to embrace the idea of what the Flaming Lips’ music could be, I would always reference that. It hints at this longing, it hints at this optimism, but a lot of that movie is about horrible tragedy and loss. I mean, the Wicked Witch... in the beginning, they kill this other witch! They kill the Wicked Witch! [Dorothy’s] in this horrible tornado in the beginning. It’s violent! There’s a lot to be scared about it. And I’m not saying kids’ movies these days [don’t], Harry Potter and all those other things all embrace that sort of thing. I think that’s why people like them so much, because it really isn’t just for kids. It has bigger things about it.

Also, for me, I still think Judy Garland, the Dorothy character... there’s elements of those songs, with her singing it... Someone else singing it would not have had the same intensity or power or believability. For me, The Wizard of Oz is so far above what we think of as dumb musicals. It has stellar songs. The themes of it are these optimistic, fantastical things. It’s about longing. It’s about this idea of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. That whole thing is saying, “The rainbow is in the distance. My life is here. I understand what my life is, and my life is real. I don’t know if I can live the life that’s over the rainbow.” We can’t stop from longing and thinking about it and believing in it, but I think it’s because we don’t ever know if we can escape into fantasy. Parts of our minds are so rooted in what’s real and what’s reasonable and what’s rational. Again, I think that’s what fantasy and music and all that childlike wonder is: it’s part of us but we’re not really able to hold it.

So it’s a lot of things. Plus it’s a very psychedelic, drug-oriented movie, and I think when it became associated with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon... It was like Reese’s Peanut Butter -- like peanut butter and chocolate -- two great fucking things that are even better when you get to fucking have ‘em together. All that. So Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz. I mean, there’s a million other things from my childhood. When I was growing up I had older brothers that took drugs and listened to music. A lot of that is lived within us. We live in the Midwest, you know. The Wizard of Oz is based on her being from Kansas. People kind of think of me sometimes as living in this magic land, “You’re living where The Wizard of Oz takes place,” and I’m like, “Not really. That was in Kansas. We’re in Oklahoma.” But they are a lot closer than New York or Los Angeles or something. A lot of it ties into that.

No! I wasn’t aware of that.

That’s what I mean. There’s this whole other world out there that you’re longing for. I know what you mean. The way that the Wizard has all this fantastical stuff -- I’ve been thinking about it because we’ve been fucking with it recently -- but what I like about the Wizard is that he says, “Yeah, this is all a farce.” It doesn’t make it less fantastic, but it’s a farce. When he gives them their fake medallions and their badges, the things he says are great things to say about courage and all that other stuff, I forget. These real humanistic qualities are the real magic, and all this other stuff is just magic stuff that we get to behold. I think that’s a great thing for a silly little movie to go to. It’s got a lot of great things about it that, if I’m lucky, apply to this world of the Flaming Lips as I create this fantastical shit that I want you to stand in front of while you’re taking acid. But also, we don’t want to forget that we’re people, and the greatest thing about being people is that we get to laugh and cry and fuck each other and have friends. We get to experience humanistic things.

[Laughs]

It is. I don’t care that much about smoking pot myself but I know a lot of people that do. A lot of people that are smoking it, they have to smoke in a sense, because they suffer from too much anxiety, and there’s this wonderful cure of smoking a joint, early in the day or later in the day, that lets them relax. I think that’s great, that’s great for them. Unfortunately, they may go to jail which would cause a lot more anxiety in their life. But I would say the opposite. I would say the Drug War is starting to have an idea what the fuck is worth having a war over. I would say, crack cocaine, crystal meth, some of these drugs, to me, are always going to be too hazardous. They’re always going to rob young people of their... I don’t know if you know the neighborhood I live in, but I live in one of the lowest income neighborhoods in all of Oklahoma.

Yeah, yeah. I’m over here in the Plaza District, but I’m on the other side of 16th, so I see it every day. The horrible destruction that drugs do, especially to young families. There’s guys over here who don’t have a job, they have four kids, they don’t know what the fuck they’re going to do, and then get addicted to fucking crystal meth. Fuck! Life is tough enough and then you get these drugs that make you insane, and they’re very addictive and very cheap and they’re everywhere. Yeah, it’s horrible.

But I’d say pot is not anywhere near, ever, the same category as crack cocaine or crystal meth. Those are completely different things. So, to me, the idea that we can say, “Pot is fine but these other drugs are bad.” I think both of those things can be true at the same time. I don’t think we need to make every drug, ever, legal, “Make ‘em all legal! Fuck it!” I don’t believe in that at all. We can sit here and analyze it and say, “Y’know, pot’s been around a long time.” Even Barrack Obama has smoked pot and he’s the President of the United States. He seems like a smart, rational, mega-thinker of a dude. Of course he [smoked pot], because he’s a smart, curious dude. He wants to find out things for himself, and one of the things he’d want to find out is, “What is pot?”

So that’s what I’m riding at. If a conservative state like Connecticut can legalize it, I say, “Yes. Fuckin’ do it.” Let’s make the laws out there in our world worthy of respect. This stupid law that makes pot illegal makes you suspect of all laws. Like, “Why are these laws here? They seem stupid.” Let’s give the law some validity and say, “Let’s change this stupid law.” That would be my argument.

Well that’s great of you to say that, and I agree. When that was brought to my attention, that Dave had said that, I hadn’t thought about it that much. I just thought I was kind of doing what I like, pursuing the things that I like, but when he said that I thought, “You know, you’re right. That does change everything. That makes a big difference” It even makes a big difference when you see someone else do it, because you may be cautious or you may think, “What’s going to happen here?,” but when you see other people do it it’s like, “Gee, what’s the harm? Fuck it!” We learn from our mistakes, but if we don’t try we’re never going to find out anything. All we’re going to know is the things that are already in our minds: things that make us afraid, things that make us second guess what we’re doing. I agree.

But I’m also doing art. I’m not flying a 747 airplane full of 500 people, you know. There are areas in our society where we want people to say, “Yes,” and take chances. See what you can do. Take risks. Part of that would be people who are thinking about smoking pot. I mention it only because I can’t think of a single artist or a single musician who wouldn’t want to try pot. Maybe they wouldn’t like it but they’d have to try it just to see what the fuck it is.



Well, that would be up to them. I’d never blame it on technology. For us, even the way that we were able to make The Soft Bulletin back in 1997, without the ways computers are working, without the way all these new digital effects were working, we probably would’ve never thought that we could make it.

As far as people communicating... People will say, to me, “Don’t you think Twitter is kind of empty?,” and I’ll say, “No. I don’t think it’s empty at all.” People say, “Texting people, is that really communicating?,” and I say, “Yes!” I can give you a thousand examples. We’re traveling in Canada; we’re traveling from the east coast to the west and stopping at a lot of places in between. Canada’s got some pretty empty areas when you get out into the middle of it. We were going to be in a place called Medicine Hat, Canada. I knew we were going to be there for an evening and I thought, “Man, what the fuck are we going to do there?” So I tweeted -- and this is the power of my Twitter account, motherfuckers -- that we were going to be in Medicine Hat, Canada. I jokingly said, “I hope I run into some mystical Indian and he brings me peyote.” It’s a stupid thing to say. What the fuck? It’s funny, you know.

People immediately tweeted me back, saying, “Wayne! That’s so cool! Go to this bar and we’ll meet you there.” I was literally walking down the street and people knew I was there, came out, took us into this little art complex where people were painting and doing music. I had just taken a picture, as I do, of a dead bird on the street. Five minutes later I was in a little art complex where they were painting a dead pigeon that they had found silver. That would have never happened if I hadn’t announced, “Hey, the Flaming Lips are bored and we’re spending 14 hours in Medicine Hat.” That, I know for sure, happens everywhere we go: if I announce where we’re at, people say, “Hey! Look at this, this is interesting.”

We were just in Barcelona a couple of days ago and I couldn’t remember where the fuck an absinthe bar was. I tweeted, “Hey, anybody out there remember where the absinthe bar is?,” and within twenty seconds four people said, “Yeah, Wayne, it’s here.” I got in a cab and we went there. It’s powerful. It doesn’t change your life, but it’s like, those are cool experiences with people who aren’t necessarily my close friends but people who I think are like-minded. That’s what I think we want. You don’t really have room for 10,000 close friends in your life because you don’t have enough time, but you have room for millions of people who are like-minded. We can connect on things that only take moments to explain to each other. I think it’s wonderful.

I don’t think these days we can ever really know what the real absinthe was like, unless you are lucky enough to run into someone who makes it themselves. We have some friends who make moonshine, and we’ve occasionally run into people in Europe that make real absinthe from real wormwood. To me, it fucks you up. It’s a good drunk. There’s a little bit more of a dream associated with it. I think it’s awesome. But, to me, it’s more that you’re in a place where people are drinking absinthe as opposed to you drinking it while everybody else is drinking something else. When you’re around 50 or 60 other weirdos at 3 o’clock in the morning and you’re all drinking absinthe, smoking cigarettes, listening to music, telling stories, there’s prostitutes outside... it’s just a fucking great place to be. [Laughs] It’s not necessarily that you’re drinking absinthe, it’s just that the absinthe has created this atmosphere. You’re not around people who are drunk on whiskey or beer or other things. Everybody there is in the same dream state. Of course, a lot of times we’re drinking Red Bull because we don’t want to stop. We want to keep going.

A lot of it I think is just luck. The natural inertia of my genes and whatever have allowed it. I do yoga almost every day. I mean, sometimes I don’t because we’re getting up at 6AM and flying or something. I try to be a happy person. I try to be involved with as many happy, healthy, energetic weirdos that are like me, that pull me along into their universe. But I think a lot of it is just dumb luck that I haven’t been injured or have any brain damage or anything like that from being alive as long as I have. Then, just seeing that my time is limited now. When you’re 20 you can almost feel like your whole life is ahead of you and nothing drives you that much. For me, when I turned 50, I was like, “Oh fuck. That’s very cool,” because I used to look at people who were 50 and think, “Those motherfuckers are done with.” I realize now that there’s a big variety of how you can be [at] 50, and I’ve been very lucky that my 50 is like... I’m healthier now than I was even 10 years ago.

But it gives me that inertia of knowing... maybe I have 50 more years, maybe only 40, maybe 30! My father died when he was 64, maybe I only have a little bit! So that drives you as well. You think, “Well I can sleep, [but] not tonight. I can sleep at the end of the week.” It pushes you. As my life has gone on I start to value experiences more than things. I’m not really concerned about having more and more things in my life. I’m lucky. I have a great house. I have all these things. Now, I’m more driven to having experiences and not just things.



Well, every other month we’re doing those elaborate, 12 inch EPs. Those, really, are very beautiful. I have a guy in Dallas who makes those, and he handfeeds the machine that the vinyl goes into. He does each one himself. They’re pretty fucking fantastic. Beyond that, I have a gummy frog that you’ll lick. The “salt box” is moving ahead. Some of the things we were trying to do on it we won’t be able to do, but some other new things have come up that we’ll be able to do. We have this sort of stroboscope that spins and you shoot a light at it and it makes these sort of... animations. Quite a few great little things.

At the end of it we still have our secret skull/vag combination that’ll have the fetus inside the skull, but we’re not showing people that yet. It’s going to be pretty fantastic. That’ll be a collection of all these songs that we’ve done [this year]. That could be 50 or 60 songs by the time we finish in February of next year. I think it’s going to be a great, freaky year for us. We’ll probably always operate like this to some extent. I don’t know if we’ll release something every month, but I have so many things now that people are showing me and saying, “Wayne! What about this? What about that?,” that I believe that if I kept pursuing I could keep releasing interesting Flaming Lips objects for five years.

Not really. I don’t think it’s the record companies at all. Make no mistake, Warner Bros. still sells shitloads of records. They just don’t sell shitloads of everybody’s records. They’re a mega-successful company even by today’s standards. They’re going to keep selling shitloads of records. Maybe not records that me and you would buy, but they’re a big, diverse company.

But with us and Warner Bros. they wanted me and the Flaming Lips to do this. They said, “Everybody keeps talking about the next thing. Well, if anybody could be the ones to do the next thing, you guys would be one of them. Why don’t you go do your thing?” We are still on Warner Bros., but we’ve been given this freedom to do our thing. What I mean by that is... we’ve always had freedom with Warner Bros., but they’re a giant bureaucracy that takes a lot of time to go from the front of the building to the back. When you do something that has the Warner Bros. stamp on it, you could not release something every month. It would take you six months just to release one thing, you know. And they know that. So, when I told them, “Here’s what I’d like to try,” they were like, “Good. Let’s do that. But you’re going to be the one that has to do it, because we can’t do that.”

That’s the great position that we’re in. We’re able to do it, we know how to do it, we want to do it. We have a lot of people connected with us that help us to do it. I think it would be very difficult for a young band who’s just starting out to do what we’re doing. We’ve been doing this a long time, so not only do we have a backlog of experience we have a lot of cool people who help us do all these things.

We wouldn’t have been able to do it on purpose. A lot of it just happened by accident, “Yes! Let’s do it!”